We can probably all agree that learning a new language isn’t the easiest thing in the world. At the same time, it’s a very good way to spend your time, as being multi-lingual can be very beneficial in the long run.Also, using your non-native language can put you in some funny situations that later turn into amusing stories you can tell at every party. That’s where our focus is today - funny stories of people using foreign languages and failing entertainingly.More info:InstagramThis post may includeaffiliate links.
We can probably all agree that learning a new language isn’t the easiest thing in the world. At the same time, it’s a very good way to spend your time, as being multi-lingual can be very beneficial in the long run.
Also, using your non-native language can put you in some funny situations that later turn into amusing stories you can tell at every party. That’s where our focus is today - funny stories of people using foreign languages and failing entertainingly.
More info:Instagram
This post may includeaffiliate links.
For years, I used the expression “up yours” as a congratulatory phrase, and nobody corrected me. Be nice to your foreigners. Correct them when they are wrong.
For a better understanding of the language-learning process,Bored Pandareached out toSwedish linguistFredrik Arhusiander. He agreed to share his insights about the topic.
He said that the biggest mistake you can make when learning a new language is to focus on your mistakes! “When we learn our native language as children, we don’t think about mistakes. We just use whatever we know to play and communicate. We only start worrying about mistakes when we start school and have tests.”
The linguist says that focusing and listening to informal dialogue is very important. “Only after you’ve learned the sounds, you should start to read. You don’t have to talk in the beginning. It’s much easier to learn to talk after you already understand a bit.”
So, my beautiful little German grandmother and wife of a minister… asked (in front of a whole group of people at church) a friend that had recently gotten married… if he enjoyed using his dads condom on his honeymoon. She meant condo… condominium.
You don’t have to tackle the grammar heavily in the beginning, as well. It’s better to first focus on the words and try to notice grammatical patterns. According to Fredrik: “As soon as you get a decent grasp of the language, make most of your studies about getting lots of input at your level. Find material you enjoy. People think you have to take courses and do exercises, but simply spending lots of time with the language, finding things you enjoy, and getting lots and lots of exposure and input, that’s what’s going to give you most of your understanding.”Lastly, if you want to reach a high level of the studied language, you have to be brave enough to speak to people in it. Build relationships in that language.Also, connecting with the culture of the language can be very beneficial, as well. Disconnecting from it can make the journey of learning way harder than it should be. So, in some cases, it might require you to put more effort into connecting with that culture if you want to learn the language. But learning a language doesn’t require much effort, right?
You don’t have to tackle the grammar heavily in the beginning, as well. It’s better to first focus on the words and try to notice grammatical patterns. According to Fredrik: “As soon as you get a decent grasp of the language, make most of your studies about getting lots of input at your level. Find material you enjoy. People think you have to take courses and do exercises, but simply spending lots of time with the language, finding things you enjoy, and getting lots and lots of exposure and input, that’s what’s going to give you most of your understanding.”
Lastly, if you want to reach a high level of the studied language, you have to be brave enough to speak to people in it. Build relationships in that language.
Also, connecting with the culture of the language can be very beneficial, as well. Disconnecting from it can make the journey of learning way harder than it should be. So, in some cases, it might require you to put more effort into connecting with that culture if you want to learn the language. But learning a language doesn’t require much effort, right?
I was going to college in the US when I saw a sign “beware of the pedestrians” and I asked the people I was with what kind of animal a pedestrian is.
I went to Spain with my husband and kept saying “escuchame!” Thinking I was saying “excuse me” And he would die laughing every time. He finally told me I was saying “LISTEN TO ME!” To everyone
At some point during the language-learning process, it’s natural to start questioning if it is worth doing that at all. After all, it requires so much effort, and sometimes, it might feel like you’re not moving ahead fast enough. Well, in such cases, you can rememberseveral waysin which the learned language might benefit your life:
In a business context I once asked a colleague for a favour and added « do I need to do doggy style » (instead of doggy eyes) the whole open space burst in laughter. I didn’t even know what it meant at the time so was very confused but I blushed really hard once the colleague explained in the coffee area 🤔😬🥴
I was a high school exchange student in Germany and was eating dinner with my host family. I tried Liver for the first time. I explained it was “mushy”….l didn’t know that Muschi in German slang meant Pus*y. My host family stared at me in shock.
When living in China I raised my arms to adjust my hair and accidently smacked a little kid in the face. I told him “you’re welcome” instead of “I’m sorry.” Lol.
A little kid dressed as a dinosaur roared at me in Peru and I said ‘tengo mierda’ (I have [poop]) instead of ‘tengo miedo’ (I’m scared). Whoops.
Join a few friends for lasertag when I moved to Germany. Random kids would come to me pointing their guns and they would shout Kartoffel (potato). I had no idea why, just assumed it was slang toall someone you just hit a potato 🥔. So I started doing the same. Bang bang and Kartoffel here and Kartoffel there. I was the queen of the potatos! During one of the breaks a friend ask: hey, why do you keep shouting Kartoffel (potato)? I explained, that was what the kids were saying. My friend first rolled his eyes than he laughed! Turns out the kids were saying ‘getroffen’ (Hit) 🎯 But my German was still so basic all I heard was potatoes!
Horrified look on cleaning lady’s face when I told her I wanted to whack her (pegar) instead of pay her (pagar). Did it with a big smile all proud of myself. When she recovered we had a big laugh.
100% true story - upon arriving in the UK from Canada I started telling potential new friends about my family enjoying the Canadian pastime of “cottaging”, which for us means “going to your or a friend’s country home to swim and waterski and build bonfires and stuff”. They looked at me aghast because in the UK it means “having gay sex in a public bathroom”. We DID become friends anyway.
When I first moved to the Netherlands, I had a Dutch bf who spoke English very well, but some things got lost in translation. I didn’t speak Dutch at the time, and one day he said his hairdresser friend was quitting her job to become an undertaker. I was shocked and asked why she chose such a drastic career change, and he said, she wants to work for herself and loves making people look beautiful. I thought ok good for her I guess, and we never spoke about it again. It wasn’t until years later (long after we’d broken up) and I’d become fluent in Dutch when I realized, oh…the Dutch word for “entrepreneur” literally translates into “undertaker” (ondernemer). She didn’t want to embalm dead bodies, she wanted to open her own hair salon.
I was in Dominican Republic with an ice cream cone and a local street boy was eyeing up my ice cream, I was calling him over to give it to him but he was getting close and running away over and over, my Dominican friends said I was mispronouncing the words to call him over and instead was shouting “I’ll cut you, I’ll cut you” so he thought I was saying I’ll cut you if you come near my ice cream while I was making gestures to hand it to him repeatedly😂 😂😂 he did end up grabbing the cone and running full top speed away, pretty risky to take ice cream from a foreign woman yelling she will cut you, he must have really wanted that ice cream 😂😂😂
When my first son was a toddler I thought “맴매“ meant dirty in Korean. So we’d be at the park and I would caution him something was dirty. Finally when he was like 2.5 my Korean mom friend told me it actually meant spanking. I’d been threatening to spank my toddler in front of other mothers for years. 😑
When I moved to the UK, whenever I got hungry I told people I was “ravishing” instead of “ravenous”. I guess they assumed I just had excellent self esteem 😂
Ooh I have a fun one. I studied abroad in France. Turns out “preservatif/preservative” in French does not mean preservatives like you find in foods, it means condoms. Have never been met with such confused silence in my life.
When I moved to Hawaii I worked at a bank telephone bill service. Japanese woman called in and every question I asked her she’d respond “HI”, to which I replied HELLO every single time. 😩 I hung up and told my Asian coworker how nice that woman was. I died when she told me she was responding YES in Japanese. 😂😂😂
A French-Canadian friend of ours told a great stories from when he was learning English. My favourites were his use of ‘skinny pig’ instead of ‘guinea pig’ and ‘spacegoat’ instead of ‘scapegoat’—both used in business meetings, btw. 😂
A friend of a friend had moved to the UK from Sweden and had an English boyfriend. In the UK we’re quite liberal with curse words and the bf and his mates would liberally use a word beginning with c amongst themselves. The girlfriend thought it was just a cheeky bit of slang like ‘mate’. Found it wasn’t when having dinner with bf’s parents, the mother made a little joke at the girlfriend’s expense to which she responded “Ha, shut up you c**t!”
In South Africa we call traffic lights 🚦 Robots. You can imagine the confusion on the drivers face when I said turn left at the robots when I first arrived in the U.K. 😱😂
When I went to see a friend at Cambridge University a parent of another student asked me what I read. Bewildered I answered “books”. Turns out, it’s fancy English to ask what one studies. 😅
I was still improving my French after moving to Tunisia and was at a friend’s house with a bunch of her relatives. They were asking me about my then boyfriend and asked “il est d’où ?” (Where is he from? I.e. which region). I understood “il est doux ?” (Is he gentle?). I thought it was a bit of a strange personal question, but answered “yes, sometimes”. They all had a good laugh.
Told my dad that no nut November was cutting out nuts from your diet to raise awareness for nut allergies, he’s been telling everyone that he managed a whole month of no nut November!
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My Dad is Norwegian and made a few blunders when he first moved to the US. 1. He was at a classical concert and said to the people he went with “see you after the intercourse” instead of intermission. He was so embarrassed he did not return. Which probably made it even more embarrassing 😂😂😂. 2. Having a meal he said “my teeth are running in water”. Which is literally what we say in Norway for “my mouth is watering”. Not embarrassing but still funny 😄
I have some similar doozies in my book. When we immigrated to America from the former USSR, we didn’t speak English and also didn’t understand that you just can’t abbreviate certain words. My mom was a microbiologist working in a lab and had to leave a note for her lab assistant. She started the note with Dear Lab A*s.., because she was in a rush. Next day she was very confused why that assistant wouldn’t speak with her 😂
A female friend who’s quite senior in advertising has been using ‘balls deep’ liberally for years, thinking it just meant ‘lets do this’ and was genuinely mortified when someone explained the actual meaning
I lived in Canada for few years now and at the tim hortons I always ordered bagel with ‘urban garlic cream cheese’ and they always got the order right but last week I bought a cream cheese that said ‘ herb and garlic’ no one ever corrected me and I just believed it might be some type of Garlic 🫣
My godmother was invited to her neighbor’s house for a pot party. She thought they meant like a potluck. She was the only one who brought food. 😂
When I was in the hospital almost 19 years ago for alcoholism, my husband came to visit me. When he went up to the desk, the worker asked if he needed validation. His first thought was, “Tell me I’m good!” It had been a rough few days since I was hospitalized. I’ve been sober since February 14, 2005
I’m from the US..I visited my friends in Scotland for some time and after the first night staying with them, in the morning my friend asked “how was your lay?” I was so embarrassed thinking that she thought I brought someone home. I guess that’s how they ask how you slept
I’m English and was working in a theme park store in the states, a customer asked how many dollars for a pack of postcards, I said in my Essex accent, free (3), she walked out with a whole bunch, had to chase her down and explain it’s my accent, they’re not free 😂😂
More cultural barrier than language barrier. On the train I overheard some Americans “digestive biscuits… do those really work?”
When I was in Spain and spoke limited Spanish, I was in a public restroom asking anyone if there was any “sopa” for “soap” instead of “jabón.” Maybe the same day I ordered lasagna from a beachside restaurant, and nobody brought me silverware to eat it with. I couldn’t remember the word for “fork,” “spoon,” or “silverware,” and I was too embarrassed to pantomime, so I just ate it with my bare hands and then went into the ocean to wash my hands like that was normal. 😅
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Our American neighbors had an Italian exchange student who asked them what the word “kazatil” meant. When asked to use it in a sentence, he replied “like you can’t have a snack kazatil ruin your dinner.” (Because that will. . .)
My mom said when she first started working in the States and someone asked her if “she got it” to confirm if she understood, and every time she would look around wondering what she was supposed to go get 🤣🤣
I thought ‘frisky’ meant chilly. I had been living in the UK for close to 20 years before I was corrected
I thought supervisor was super wiser, someone really smart. I also thought people were irritating the ground instead of irrigating and I wondered how and why would you irritate the fields.
In my first year in Australia in high school, I asked the girl sitting next to me if she had any “Twink” - which is the brand for white-out correction fluid for fixing my mistake on paper which was written in ink… well, that’s not how we use the word…
Working in India, I brought a box of cookies for the staff to share. Their supervisor was holding the box when I looked in the almost empty box and said the staff had made a dent in it. The supervisor then examined the box, looking for the dent 😄.
American living in Australia - for a first date a guy said “we’ll meet in the arvo”. I spent so long googling and looking at our campus map for “the Arvo”. When I told him I needed the address for the arvo he explained to me it meant “afternoon”
My moms first years in Canada she had to take the bus.. my uncle told her to ask the bus driver if he was going to a specific intersection. He kept nodding and pointing at the coin collector so she could pay. After asking him multiple times, angered he said yes and pointed once again to the coin collector.. so my mom went over to the coin collector and whispered if the bus was going to the intersection. 😂😂 the bus driver couldn’t help but laugh and just let her through… 😂😂😂
I would love parking validation every time I make it into a parallel spot
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